Syracuse, N.Y. — St. Francis forward Jalen Cannon revealed his team's defensive rationale earlier this week. The Terriers scanned the Syracuse statistics, watched the Orange on film and arrived at an obvious conclusion:

They would expend a lot of energy trying to stop SU's best player.

C.J. Fair had taken 45 shots in SU's first three games and made 24 of them. He was the Orange's leading scorer, its highest-volume shooter. For St. Francis, the strategy seemed startlingly simple: It would rotate players on Fair defensively. They would attempt to limit Fair's touches, and thus, his impact on the game. They would face-guard him, pester him, make his night a frustrating experience.

The Orange beat the Terriers, 56-50. But Fair, the Wooden Award candidate, the ACC preseason player of the year, struggled through a 2-for-13 night.

"C.J., they made it hard for him to get anything," SU coach Jim Boeheim said. "He had tough shots all night."

Going into the Maui Invitational, which starts Monday for SU with a 5:30 p.m. (ET) game vs. Minnesota on ESPN2, Fair leads the Orange in scoring at 18 points per game. SU's next best scorers, Trevor Cooney (12.8) and Jerami Grant (11.7), are both sophomores with limited game experience.

Fair figures to be the focal point of defenses this season. He knows it. He expects it. So do his teammates.

"I'm surprised the other teams before didn't do that," Cooney said of the Terriers' obsession with Fair. "He's one of the best scorers in the country, he's the best player on our team and they're going to try to take him away. And it's our job to help him get open and to find him in the right spots to get him going."

"I think they probably will," SU guard Michael Gbinije said. "C.J.'s such a great player, he demands a lot of defensive attention. The way we can handle that is to do a better job of getting C.J. open and playing off of C.J. better. Instead of just standing — relocating and moving and making it easier for him to operate."

The Orange worked earlier this week in practice on the business of setting solid screens, not only to free Fair, but any number of his teammates. SU players have had a nagging tendency to get to the point of the screen, but fail to actually make bodily contact.

Fair prefers to chalk up poor personal shooting performances to his failure to execute the way he knows he is capable. He acknowledged St. Francis' concentration on him was "intense," but believes the shots he took were typical, makeable scoring opportunities that he simply failed to convert.

"I never feel like it's a defender stopping me," he said. "I just feel like it was one of those days I couldn't get going and then I kind of got frustrated."

He expects that Minnesota, with its Pitino-family emphasis on pressure defense, will attempt to take him out of the SU basketball equation on Monday. He expects that defenses will devote an ample amount of energy to stopping him this season.

If that's the case, his teammates can help by freeing Fair with screens, or by making defenses pay for concentrating solely on Fair.

"If they want to run 2-3 guys at him, then we gotta find the right spots," Cooney said. "C.J.'s a smart basketball player. He's gonna make the right reads and if we get to those open spots we're going to get open shots or easy dunks or something like that. You almost want teams to do that to C.J. just so we make the right play and get the ball to the right guy."